13 Goals and a Confession

Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard

Sports fandom is a bizarre and mysterious phenomenon.   Who knows how many singular events have led any person to become attracted and then addicted to a group of grownups playing kids games for sport.  Of course it has to be some combination of the geography we’re born into, the heritage of family tradition, and a huge heaping dose of personality disorders that can’t be helped, because we guys aren’t strong when it comes to restraint.  There’s a reason why men wake up at 4am to go catch fish or buy green pants to play golf or punch strangers at Little League games.  It’s stupidity.

Of course, it’s not just men and sports.  I heard a great story tonight about a woman who obsessed about ex-Replacements lead singer Paul Westerberg, the ringleader of a notorious band of drunken drugged underachievers.  If she heard any news of a Paul Westerberg show anywhere in the country, she’d fly to it and do everything in her power to get with PW.   He was the only man for her.  Considering Paul has mostly subsisted on a diet of pills, hatred and bar juice, this was a campaign with significant drawbacks.  I’m not sure what caused her to do this, but there’s a 95% chance it was a three-minute long Replacements song.

I do the same for the St. Louis Cardinals.  And as of today I now do the same for Liverpool FC after they scored 13 goals in one week, decimating Real Madrid and Manchester United (the two richest franchises in the world) and then today embarrassing a good Aston Villa team 5-0.

It’s easy to get nuts about a team when things are going this well, I realize that.  We’re called fair-weather fans or bandwagon fans, and true fans hate them with a passion.  I feel I’ve earned my stripes with my  Cardinals whom I’ve supported for 75% of my life:  I waited 24 years between championships, I would still skin umpire Don Denkinger with a rusty steak knife for costing my team the 1985 World Series ring, and I nearly had a seizure in 2006 when we finally won, and I didn’t know what to do with all that adrenaline or joy, because I’d never felt quite a megadose of those proportions  in such a quick period of time.

In many ways the 2006 World Series win was harder for me to fathom than September 11th; not because the resplendent results of the former compare in any way, shape or form to the tragedy of the latter, but because it took me hours and days longer to put the Series win in any sort of context.  (And also, I wanted to get a rise out of you.)

I haven’t experienced any of that with Liverpool FC.  Soccer was my favorite sport to play as a kid, but I never watched it because there was no soccer to watch.  In the ’90s I started rooting for the U.S. National team in competition, but couldn’t understand why I didn’t enjoy it.  (I found out later it was because the U.S. National team sucked.  Fuck you, Alexi Lalas and Tony Meola.)  But moving to New York and spending a quite ridiculous proportion of my time in English and Irish bars I saw many more games, and remembered not only that I loved the game but I was deeply envious of the crowds in attendance and the bar regulars who crowded around the TV sets.  I wanted to be part of that experience.  I wanted a team.  I chose Liverpool.

I could have picked any team, and I chose this one, which is not a boast but a confession; I don’t deserve this team yet.  I’ve never been to Liverpool or anywhere in England.  The vague history I have of the team is gleaned from wikipedia and ‘Fever Pitch’.  I would be embarrassed and mortified to call myself a diehard Liverpool fan, especially when thinking of the true fans who have lived with this team for generations and hard times, who have their own Don Denkingers to skin.

I screened a year’s worth of League matches before I decided, considering a few criteria.  First, they had to be good.  If I don’t have to inherit a team because they were my father’s team, why would I pick a crappy one?   Second, I had to enjoy their style of play.   When national teams play, I’m not a fan of English football; I find Spanish football much more graceful, creative and engaging. Liverpool’s starting lineup features more  Spaniards than Real Madrid put out for the recent Champions’ League match.  Their midfield is anchored by the very-underrated Xabi Alonso.  Their stingy defense features a great right back in Alvaro Arbeloa, and Pepe Reina in goal, who is above average in his netminding but unprecedented in the Premier League for distributing the ball and setting up offensive runs.  And then of course, there’s my man-crush Fernando Torres up front.  I man-crush him like Hernandez man-crushes Danilo Gallinari, only Torres is a world-class player.

Third, and most importantly, I needed a team whose star(s) were not major assholes.  That immediately ruled out Chelsea and Manchester United, as Ashley Cole is the most hateful overrated crapcock in the game today and Wayne Rooney is a dumbshit hooligan who happened to inherit a good right foot.  And then there’s Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the best players in the game, but he still finds it necessary to take dive after dive and bitch, whine and moan the whole way.  And he takes that ridiculous stance before every free kick.  I’d say this clip captures his essence pretty well.

Most shamefully of all, the intangible reason I picked Liverpool was because their transcendent song  ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, thanks to Pink Floyd’s ‘Fearless’, which fades into a spine-tingling version of the Liverpool chant. And I realise that’s extremelys pathetic.  Walking into a St. Louis library and discovering a copy of Pink Floyd’s 1971 album ‘Meddle’ should not be reason enough for me to lose sleep over a British football team. (Thanks, Pink Floyd.  Other rock bands would’ve tried to get me laid, you got me into Liverpool football.  Assholes.)

None of that matters anymore.  After this amazing 13-goal week I am now 100% obsessed with this team.  It might, of course, be because of their great play and the subsequent bed-shitting that Manchester United is currently trying to sneak down to the washing machine without waking Mom. But now this team puts me on edge.  In anticipation of Sunday’s match I slept for 2 hours.  When I sat down on my couch at 11am for the match and realized it started at noon, I freaked out; I had no idea how to waste the hour.  While Liverpool recognized a minute of pre-game silence for recently departed club secretary Bryce Morrison, a person I’ve never heard of before, I screamed at my cat for not observing the silence.  And when Albert Riera scored the second goal in Sunday’s Villa beatdown on an incredible ball from Pepe Reina, I spontaneously combusted, complete with guttural yell and primitive dance.

By the way, here’s how that Westerberg story ended. So this woman (let’s call her ‘Heidi’, because that’s her name)  flies to Miami for the Paul show, gets backstage and somehow finds herself back in Paul’s hotel room.  Paul is completely hopped up on dozens of anti-prescription pills, but Heidi is in heaven.  In a truly romantic move, she asks him to sign her inner thigh to commemorate the moment, but because he’s completely rocked, the signature is less ‘Paul Westerberg’ and more ‘Puhhhh Wuuhhhhhhh’, but that doesn’t matter to our classic Heidi.   She not only saves the signature, she gets the exact signature tattooed onto her thigh the next day.

That’s what bonds sluts like me to sluts like Heidi, and why I feel that I may be a true Liverpool fan after all.    We have no concern about short-bussing our lives in the pursuit of pointless dreams like football trophies or rock-star semen, even if we have to take a Sharpied thigh along the way.   We know what we love, and we do what we have to do.